A Progressive Government with Women’s Strength

Colectivo Memorias Queer. Caring for the government’s agenda.

A PROGRESSIVE GOVERNMENT WITH

WOMEN’S STRENGTH

With the arrival of the first Colombian administration that recognizes itself as openly anti-patriarchal, with Francia Márquez Mina as Vice President, new questions and challenges arise for the feminist movement, a political force that was decisive in the presidential elections.

TEXT AND PHOTO: FONDO LUNARIA MUJER

A

new landscape has opened up with the arrival of Francia Márquez Mina and Gustavo Petro Urrego as Vice President and President of the Republic of Colombia. On August 7, 2022, the first progressive government in the history of the country was inaugurated, representing an indisputable victory for the social, ethnic, agrarian, feminist, and popular movement, a debt paid for the generations of victims of the armed conflict and with young

people that decided to put an end to the history that had turned its back on the Final Peace Accord.

A victory of these dimensions entails an infinity of challenges that come with such a first; yet this government will not be granted the benefit of a learning curve. On August 7th, a four-year count-down began that brings with it the possibility of changing the conservative and oligarchical inclination of the executive branch or, alternatively, of reverting to a progressivism that was not up to the task of governing. Feminist women, in all our diversity, have an enormous task at hand.

The electoral campaign that culminated in the triumph of Márquez and Petro turned a spotlight on structural issues that have relegated the peripheral territories to poverty and exclusion, something which the social movement has denounced on all fronts: structural racism, institutional misogyny, extractivist colonialism; in a word, the political and economic model of accumulation that for centuries has made a wealthy political class at the expense of labor and the lives of racialized, feminized, and jeopardized bodies. These issues and struggles have fed the discourses and organization of young feminist women: their impact been transversal across body and experience. Our agenda includes sustainable alternatives that can turn the situation around.

Francia Márquez Mina, our Vice President, realizes this. Her voice and life experiences, which have made great strides in advancing the representation of Black girls and women, is part of the body of the grassroots feminist fight that not only advocates for gender justice but also has a proposal for the country, one that is embodied in the Afro-Colombian slogan “live with flavor” and which is composed of an intersectional understanding of the previously mentioned structural elements that have hindered the ability to live in harmony with our context, nature, and everyone around us.

The name of Márquez and Petro’s political program, “Colombia, World Power for Life,” is a continuation of this slogan, as the title of its first section: “Change Is with Women.” Its proposals for women’s political participation, guarantees for our sexual and reproductive rights,

financial equality and independence, and the defense of a life free from violence, among other elements of the Program, are nothing but the recognition of decades of organizing by women and sexual dissidents throughout the country. The organizations of the Red Lunaria have raised these and other initiatives for a life with dignity and peace with social justice.

Yet the rise of not only these initiatives but also the security of many of the women who have fought for them and developed them from a position of opposition, carries the risk of demobilizing the activist nature of the social movement. We know that those of us who developed these political proposals are called to lead their implementation on all fronts but we are also accustomed to others viewing feminist participation and agendas with distrust, even in progressive circles. There, in the defense our non-negotiable, minimal rights, lies what is probably the greatest challenge we face as part of the social sector of this administration.

For decades, even centuries, we have strengthened our ability to respond to and defend against the violence of a new government that aims to make us disappear through tactics such as institutional persecution, stigmatization of the opposition, a military apparatus that violates human rights, etc. But we are much less experienced in the political control of a power that appears to be aligned with us.

We are not strangers to working to build this new country with individuals who, in the past and surely in the future, have committed acts of violence against us. We know that machismo, racism, ableism, colonialism, and classism are structures that also reside in progressive circles but the journey has only just began and the hope generated by Márquez and Petro’s victory gives us confidence in others, in the will they have to recognize us from a place of care and transformation. Maybe this is the best contribution feminists can make to this new scenario: we always believed in life, in forgiveness, in asking ourselves how we heal beyond punitive justice. And we are ready to continue doing this, now from a place of power. FM